In some situations, it may be desirable to determine the location and/or movement of a person or another object within a building or a relatively well defined space such as a home, a hospital, a prison, etc. Large facilities may be subject to incidents or other events that need to be handled rapidly and efficiently by first responders such as, for example, firefighters, police officers, search and rescue teams, and so forth. A common problem encountered by first responders is the difficulty in capturing and transmitting accurate and up to date information to a command center and then providing such information to the first responders who responds on site to the incident. Incident commanders require numerous tools to assist them with managing an incident.
Current first responder systems are unable to accurately locate, track and monitor personnel within a structure during an incident, visualize the location and track the responders on a geospatial map and/or structure, and provide such information in a standard and efficient manner to the interested parties during the incident. A robust and flexible capability is therefore required to assist incident commanders in accurately locating and tracking the responders anywhere in the incident environment. Such a capability is also necessary to permit key personnel to rapidly and effectively deploy, re-deploy, and direct their resources to identified at-risk individuals. Such a capability is also important to permit individuals at risk during life threatening incidents to understand and respond to the consequences of potential threats to their responder resources in real-time during such incidents.
Regardless of the configurations and designs of such first responders systems, there is an overarching requirement and a need for tracking and locating people and assets within a subject structure. Most prior art location tracking techniques attempt to address the problem of automatic location sensing and their accuracy also has improved in recent years, although their effectiveness varies from one system to another. The error between an observed location and a real location, however, is still unavoidable due to various factors such as, for example, signal intervention, various infrastructures, and so on.
Based on the foregoing, it is believed that a need exists for an accurate position location and tracking system and method suitable for a wide range of facilities and in variable environments. A need also exists for an improved method for enhancing location sensing based on topology constraint, as described in greater detail herein.